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Acknowledgments

I cannot quite fix the moment when slaves became a focus for my research. Somehow the topic was there all the time, though not as an explicit and independent project. And so my gratitude goes first to colleagues and friends who showed interest along the way by reading the small pieces of work that began this book. Financial support was never altogether absent. In 1980 the Ford Foundation in Lima and the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales in Buenos Aires supported my research into peasant communities and family history. Paralleling the official research of Indians' complaints within the archives of Lima's Audiencia Real and Cabildo was an accumulation of information about Lima's slaves. Between 1983 and 1986 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Bonn sponsored a research project on conjugal conflict and on women in Lima that allowed me to work in the archbishopric archives and to consult parish registers of marriages for information on quarrels among spouses who were domestic servants—slaves. The topic caught my interest and full attention: here is the place to acknowledge the chance encounters and indirect courses that contributed to the book.

Heraclio Bonilla was one of the persons in Lima who convinced me that the information I was gathering was both rich and important; my first published pages on this topic resulted from his insistence. The support and interest of many colleagues in Lima in the department of economics at the Catholic University and at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, during conferences, coffee conversations, and debates, have helped clarify my ideas for this and other projects. Especially significant was a seminar I taught in 1986 at the Catholic University's anthropology department, on the black population's experiences in different geographical and historical settings. The eight students and I set out to gather information from interviews with Lima's black inhabitants and presented the results at a public conference that same year. Among the people we interviewed were members of the


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Movimiento Congo, who work to improve the conditions of Peru's black population. Talks and other conferences followed this contact, and their views have shaped my account of Lima's past, though it may not be the story they had hoped to hear.

I regret not having the opportunity to discuss my account with the late Alberto Flores Galindo, whose genial presence limeños will miss for a long time to come. Carlos Aguirre is now an intellectual companion on the same route, and the similarities in our conclusions encourage me.

Over long searches through the archives, I incurred many debts to individuals there who were unfailingly helpful and courteous. Despite working conditions that were often difficult, such as the lack of detailed catalogues (or the absence of catalogues, in some cases), their memories were critical resources for my research. Mario Ormeño in the Archivo Arzobispal, and Mario Cárdenas and Yolanda Bisso in the Archivo General de la Nación were sources of help and encouragement through strikes, threats of flood and fire, and bureaucratic regulations.

A welcoming intellectual environment here at the University of California, San Diego, has helped me finish the manuscript, and my colleagues Michael Monteón and Ramón Ruiz have provided valuable comments on it. The detailed assessment of Frederick Bowser, and the thoughts of the other two anonymous readers for the University of California Press, offered good advice and suggestions that found great resonance in the final corrections of December 1991 though I did not follow all the good advice. Many thanks go to all of them.

The abundant primary sources made the task of translating the manuscript into English slow and complex, and Alexandra Stem worked hard to capture the flavor of the historical agents and moments; Nelson Altamirano helped polish and shape the tables. The efforts and patience of Eileen McWilliams and Erika Büky, my editors at Berkeley, and the detailed, sophisticated, and accurate copyediting of Edith Gladstone have contributed to the style and rigor of the arguments. I presented an earlier version of the first chapter in April 1991 at a conference in Lima organized by the Movimiento Congo and the Catholic University; the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos published it in 1992 in its Serie Mínima. I first discussed a small sample of the documents that underlie this book in 1979 and 1980, in articles for the Revista Histórica .


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Personal acknowledgments are the most difficult to write because, lacking precise moments or expressions, they are hard to grasp. Of these, I owe the most profound debt to my parents, Helga and Joachim, for their endless support; the book is dedicated to them. Many compensating and cheerful moments at lighter levels of life have come from the generous presence of Francisco, Ximena, and Gari, my"kids"; of Nelson, my husband; of Marcela Calisto and Milagros Navarro, good friends; and of my students in Lima and San Diego. Last but not least in this list is Nelly Céspedes, who took over all domestic chores in Lima to make the project possible in the first place.


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